I'm going over some older code of mine with the intention of resolving some intermittent problems users have had with the file upload feature in one of my CGI's. I have a CGI that allows users to upload a picture of themselves (a la Perl Monks)... very simple. The file size limit is 30K, and I've limited it to JPEGS only.

Anyway, my original code used the "param is a filename and a filehandle" technique from CGI.pm like:

use CGI qw(:standard);

$photo_save_name ="something";
    
my $file_name = param('photo');
   
if ($file_name !~ /\.jpe?g$/) {
    $error = "You can only upload a picture in JPEG format.";
}
    
open (F, ">$photo_save_name");

while (<$file_name>) {
    print F;
}
[download]

There's lots of problems here: 1) it doesn't work under strict, 2) checking MIME is better than checking regex, 3) It doesn't check for filesize. I checked out Ovid's nice (Ovid) Re: File Upload To Selected Directory to get going but none of the file upload features from CGI.pm seem to be working.

For example:

• $CGI::POST_MAX = 36000; is not preventing uploads of (for example) 100k+ files
• my $fh = upload($file_name); is not returning a filehandle... and it doesn't throw an error, even though $file_name is verified to exist (as a string, at least)
• my $tmpfile=tmpFileName($file_name); returns an empty string
• my $format = uploadInfo($file_name)->{'Content-Type'} throws a "Cannot use undefined value as a hash reference" error, even though (like above) $file_name at least has a string value.

I know that the data is getting to CGI.pm (yes, I'm using multipart/form-data on my web page). I know that CGI.pm is at least sort of working, since my original method works fine. My script is using CGI.pm version 2.74 (verified by die ("Version is $CGI::VERSION"); Anyone have the slightest idea of what's going on? Oh yeah, the Perl version is 5.004. Please, someone tell me I'm an idiot.

Thanks bunches!

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer

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